Along with Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, Hanne Darboven and others, Kawara gave special prominence to language.

1995,” from Reykjavík, Iceland, or “13 JUIN 2006,” from Monte Carlo);[5] Esperanto is used when the first language of a given country does not use the Roman alphabet (“6 AŬG.

[7] The paintings, executed in Liquitex on canvas, conform to one of eight standard sizes, ranging from 8x10 inches up to four by six feet,[3] all horizontal in orientation.

The exceptions are the three paintings, roughly five by seven feet, executed on July 16, 20 and 21, 1969 — three days when the world was riveted by the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

[9] Eschewing stencils in favor of hand-drawn characters, Kawara skillfully renders the script, initially a sans-serif, elongated version of Gill Sans, later a quintessentially modernist Futura.

Kawara created nearly 3,000 date paintings[14] in more than 112 cities worldwide in a project that was planned to end only with his death.

[15] Much like the Today series, Kawara uses the number of days followed by the date the work was executed as his life-dates.

[17] The length of each correspondence ranged from a single card to hundreds sent consecutively over a period of months; the gesture's repetitive nature is counterbalanced by the artist's peripatetic global wanderings and exceedingly irregular hours (in 1973 alone he sent postcards from twenty-eight cities).

The artwork was first made in 1969, the year of the Woodstock music festival, major civil protests against the Vietnam War and man's first landing on the Moon.

In 2002 Oliver Augst and Christoph Korn directed the radio production of the Hessischer Rundfunk of One Million Years (consisting of 32 CDs).

In 2004, the project traveled to Trafalgar Square in London for a continuous outdoor reading lasting 7 days and 7 nights.

[6] In Pure Consciousness, a traveling exhibition initiated in 1998, Kawara lent seven Date paintings (January 1 to January 7, 1997) to kindergartens and schools in Madagascar, Australia, Bhutan, Côte d'Ivoire, Colombia, Turkey, Japan, Finland, Iceland, Israel, Canada and the United States.

[21] Kawara's first comprehensive retrospective, "On Kawara—Silence"[22] at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, was installed in 12 sections according to a plan devised by himself.

[9] Another date painting, May 1, 1987, set an auction record for Kawara when it sold for almost $2 million at Christie's New York in 2014.